The Washington Nationals rebuild suffered cracks in its foundation. Can a patch-job fix it, or is this a partial teardown to rebuild again? PoBO Paul Toboni spoke about building a strong foundation. What Toboni wants to build on starts with the team drafting and developing top prospects for the long-term to where this is a farm system you can count on. And Toboni talked about building a scouting and development monster and turning out great prospects “year-over-year-after-year where you have all of this young talent non-stop coming up to the big leagues,” as Toboni said in an interview.

Part of the issue now is a top heavy farm system that isn’t deep, and some of the top prospects have not been productive at the MLB level. Some players who have been productive have not been consistent. But a systemic issue in the farm system is the same ongoing issues caused by drafting to flawed archetypes of the past. It all started there. Baseball has proven time and again that it is very difficult to fix major flaws on players.

Case and point is you don’t draft deeply flawed players in the first round. You pass on them, and if they are available beyond the second round, that is when you might risk a draft pick on a toolsy player with a known flaw.

When you go after big-bodied pitchers with blazing fastballs and ignore their command and control — that is a major flaw in the strategy. On the offensive side, going after big bats while ignoring the swing-and-miss issues is another major flaw.

What changed after 2011 in draft philosophy? You look at Anthony Rendon and he wasn’t big-bodied nor was he considered a power bat. He was a great hitter with top contact skills. If they had stayed on that path of drafting good fundamental baseball players — they probably wouldn’t have a system that ranks last in making contact within the strike zone in the Nats’ minor league system.

The indelible image of that swing and miss was the №5 overall pick in the 2022 draft in the first round, Elijah Green, who is a player that still has not reached a level past A-Ball. Obviously he skews those numbers. But there are others too. And much more than you would want to admit to. FanGraphs measures contact inside the strike zone as Z-Swing% and outside the strike zone as O-Swing%. Both are issues. Thinking you can change a player rarely works. Just look at Danny Espinosa and Michael A. Taylor.

If you remember during the 2016 NLDS, former manager Dusty Baker was questioned in a postgame interview why he was playing Espinosa. He was 0-3, with 3 Ks, and six runners left-on-base in the NLDS opener. Baker’s response to why he was playing Espinosa, “Well, who else do I have? That’s my answer. If you can give me somebody better, than I can play somebody instead of him.” Espinosa was traded after the season. Baker essentially forced his GM’s hand by that statement. And Taylor was DFA’d after the 2020 season. As much as both players were beloved in Washington, they were both very flawed if we can be honest.

Yes, no team will be built with all perfect players. Everyone has flaws — some just more than others. And most feel that Baker had a better roster than the team that won the 2019 World Series. Managers have to improve their players, and put them in situations where they can succeed.

Baseball America’s JJ Cooper wonders if the Nats are on a course-correction due to inherent problems within the farm system.

Are you nervous about a course-correction as Cooper ponders? What if Toboni decides that 2026 should be a tank year? If that is his thinking, should he trade both MacKenzie Gore and CJ Abrams as some have suggested? MLB Trade Rumors already listed Gore as their №1 trade chip in a weekend article, and Abrams is at №23 in that article.

Former Nats’ GM, Jim Bowden, who works for CBS Sports as a lead MLB analyst and insider and is also a co-host of the “Inside Pitch” show on the MLB Network Radio channel on SiriusXM, thinks the Nats should definitely trade Gore and Abrams.

There are interesting parallels with Toboni who was on the receiving end of a Garrett Crochet trade when Toboni was with the Red Sox last year. In order to get Crochet, the Red Sox gave up Braden Montgomery, Wikelman González, Chase Meidroth and Kyle Teel in a blockbuster package. In fact, T-Bone spoke about being the person who had to tell Teel that he was traded.

As MLBTR writes, “The White Sox traded two comparably priced years of Crochet for a four-player package headlined by a pair of top-100 prospects (Teel and Montgomery) last offseason. Crochet was coming off much better results, but had never held up for a whole season as a starter. Gore has proven the durability aspect and shown flashes of pitching at a Crochet-esque level. The trade value here seems comparable.” 

The same strategy should be in-place for trading Gore or anybody else. If you get the package that you want for the player, you make the deal. The fall-out to deal with is going to be that the team will not be pushing to come out of the rebuild, rather they are course correcting for 2026. Fans might not want to hear this — but that is probably the prudent decision. You can admit the rebuild failed for a variety of reasons.

Even if you threw $100 million in annual salaries at the problem, you probably don’t change the underlying issues. This is where the Mets and Phillies have the divide when you compare them to the Dodgers. Having a top farm system and top player development people matter. The Phillies didn’t have the depth to overcome the Zack Wheeler injury while the Dodgers were built on depth, and change just one letter with the Mets and they become the Mess.

Watching competitive baseball would be great, but righting the inherent problems is the correct path. Admitting the problems are there is the start. Bad drafts, bad player development, and poor decisions have been there for a long time. The Nats aren’t the first and won’t be the last World Series team that won despite a poor farm system. They had a Top-7 payroll at the time, and put together a magical season with enough youth that blossomed at the right time with Juan Soto, Victor Robles, Trea Turner, and others that melded so well with the “Los Viejos” to win it all.

The players who were on that 2019 roster took 14 years from start to finish to assemble. From Ryan Zimmerman‘s draft in 2005 to Stephen Strasburg in 2009, Rendon in 2011, the Max Scherzer free agent acquisition in 2015 and on and on, a great team was built. But it was built simultaneously to a farm system that was barren. Some didn’t want to see it. We wrote about it over and over. Nobody wants to hear about problems 100s of miles away when you are playing great baseball in your MLB stadium.

You might not want to hear the reality of the situation. You might want to scream that this is the Lerner ownership group’s fault, and yes, it starts at the top. They allowed it to go on for far too long. But don’t bash them for not spending to put on a lavish party on the Titanic. That is a cover-up. That’s just window dressing over a collapsing wall. Toboni’s job is to build this right. To get it right. A World Series manager once said that bumpy roads lead to beautiful places. We are still on a bumpy road.